Igbo professional migratory orders, hometown associations and ethnicity in the USA

In this article I examine ethnographically the discursive means by which Igbo speakers in hometown associations in the USA are crafting lives and communities abroad to express a territory-bound sense of ethnic group membership. I contend that Igbo speakers living abroad are undergoing a process of ethnic formation or ethnification that is structured by increased rates of immigration and recent historical and political change in Nigeria. In response to these events, shifting representations of self and group identity incur an essentialist quality from abroad. Such essentialism is a paradoxical earmark of globalization for the brain-drain Igbo professional.